PART 8

6 Month Summary

A belated, half-hearted attempt at a summary of the first 6 months of using a
Mac.

Episode 3

Tue Nov 01 09:24:21 2005

Star Wars Episode 3 is released on DVD today. I used my HMV coupon
and got it for $21.99.

Plot-holes don't really matter if you are prepared to believe in
a machine that can destroy an entire planet.

New FreeBSD Logo

Tue Nov 01 21:50:10 2005

It's gone from "cute satanic" to "severely pornographic".

iFire

Wed Nov 02 01:23:53 2005

<johnsu01> e1f`: my mom's mac caught on fire
<e1f`> 00o_o00
<e1f`> the mini or the ibook?
<johnsu01> there were no visible flames, but the room did fill with
quite a bit of smoke
<johnsu01> actually this was her iMac, desktop.
<e1f`> i'm sure she has cause for apple fixing it for free
<johnsu01> it was still under warranty, and they fixed it quick.
<e1f`> johnsu01: fixed the original or swapped it?
<johnsu01> not positive, but I think they just fixed it.
<e1f`> it's not everyday a computer catches fire
<johnsu01> I know it
<johnsu01> maybe she was overclocking it ;)

Great Expectations

Wed Nov 02 19:05:55 2005

At the time I drew the above cartoon, I didn't own a Mac; I now
know that "Apple" should have read "Mac".

Scary Smart

Thu Nov 03 00:00:36 2005

Last Sunday's NY Times had a full-page Halloween-themed Google
recruitment ad (it suggested Googling for "scary smart") and a
full-page cover-story on the business (revenue generating) side of
Google— the Google Ads and AdSense.

Google is looking for several positions, including a Data Center
Technician, in Toronto.

Well, I've sent-off an email to Google. Another interesting
question asked by <johnsu01>: why are pages of a work that is
no longer copyrighted, marked "Copyrighted Material".

Fri Nov 04 17:51:55 2005: I received a reply to my query;
to summarize: the Google Print program is in its infancy and we
hope to add more public domain books in the future. Thank you for
your understanding.

Complexity

We interrupt this program for an important
announcement...

The price we pay for the complexity of life is
too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put
in— telephonic, technological and relational— to alter even the
slightest bit of behaviour in this strange world we call social life,
you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples
and their physical work.—Jean Baudrillard

It is the last lesson of modern science, that the
highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but
by the highest complexity.—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sat Nov 05 00:00:30 2005

Earlier this week, David sent me a link to Ben Goodger's blog
discussing a usability study for tabbed browsing. As it happens, I just
finished reading an article in the Oct. 16 issue of the NY Times
Magazine, titled, “Meet the Life Hackers”, about
Microsoft's usability study on interruptions— given the number
of times a worker is interrupted during a typical workday, would it
be possible to find a "convenient time" to interrupt a worker?
Answer: Yes.

The article also mentioned another usability test that Microsoft
performed— did bigger screens help with cognition?

The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular
sized 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks
designed to challenge their powers of concentration— like a Web
search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone
number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time
using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma
TV.

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at
least 10 percent more quickly— and some as much as 44 percent
more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-dgit
number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on
their brains.

The article goes on to say that in 20 years of research,
Czerwinski (the MS researcher), "had never seen a single tweak to a
computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity."

Finally, Apple did not escape mention...

By a sizable margin, life hackers are devotees, not of Microsoft but
of Apple, the company's only real rival in the creation of operating
systems— and a company that has often seemed to intuit the
need for software that reduces the complexity of the
desktop...Apple's computers have long been designed specifically to
soothe the confusions of the technologically ignorant. For years, that
meant producing computer systems that seemed simpler than the ones
Microsoft produced, but were less powerful...But for many users,
simplicity now trumps power...Now that multi-tasking is driving us
crazy, we treasure technologies that protect us. We love Google not
because it brings us the entire Web, but because it filters it out,
bringing us the one page we really need.

Requiem for a Kernel Panic

On most all Unices I have known, a kernel panic is a
stress-filled, worrisome event— numerous log messages with
asterisks scroll-by and the computer beeps several times to attract
your attention to its last breath. Compare this with a OS X kernel panic (I only realized I
had witnessed a kernel panic several days after it had happened)
where a multi-language overlay appears on the screen and the computer
begs your forgiveness that it needs to re-start and it apologizes for
the inconvenience— only in OS X would a kernel panic be a thing
of grace and beauty.

iMac Review

“iPod, Therefore I Am”

Sun Nov 06 10:14:13 2005

In last Sunday's NY Times Book Review, Dave Itzkoff reviewed Dylan
Jone's book “iPod, Therefore I Am” (half the book is
about the iPod, the other half is about Jones) and made the following
observation:

There was once a time when being a pop-music critic required a record
library that took up at least half of your apartment, a criterion that
conveniently limited that trade to those with the the precise
combination of free time, dispensable income and arrested development
to cultivate such a collection. What makes the iPod so alluring and
yet so threatening is that when you can fit that same collection into
an affordable device the size of a deck of cards and call up any
song in it at the touch of a button it makes these people— and
their books— largely trivial.

Dan Cederholm recently
noted a new radio station that "plays everything". There is
possible future where there will only be 3 kinds of radio stations:
Country and Western, Classical and Play Everything; the Talk Radio
stations will just become Podcasts.

Yet Another Emacs

I found yet another Emacs for OS X— Emacs.app is a
Cocoa-based Emacs that attempts to follow OS X desktop and UI
conventions. It is currently a developer release only.

One Million Macs Served

Tue Nov 08 00:13:33 2005

Note the difference between the AppleInsider headline,
"Over 1 million Windows to Mac converts so far in 2005?" and the
Slashdot headline,
"Over 1 Million Windows to Mac Converts So Far in 2005"; the
difference is a single character— the question-mark at the end
of the headline is missing on Slashdot giving the wrong impression
that 1 million Windows users have converted to Macs. This is
certainly not the case because the analyst is quoted as saying:

If we ASSUME that all of the growth in Mac
shipments during the past three quarters resulted from Windows users
purchasing a Mac, then purchases by Windows users exceeded one
million.

That would be a bad assumption to make, as many Mac users have
upgraded their old Macs with newer Macs.

The Venerable Floppy

Tue Nov 08 18:02:50 2005

The 3.5 inch floppy disc is 25 years old and is close to
obsolescence as USB keys, optical media and firewire drives gain in
popularity and storage capacity. However, the icon for "saving a
document", in applications that display a toolbar— Photoshop,
Word, Emacs— is still a picture of a floppy disc.

Gods, Monsters and Myths

Wed Nov 09 00:00:37 2005

Recently on #emacs, <twb> mentioned a rumour that the
rainbow Apple logo was a hidden reference and a tribute to Alan
Turing and his suicide by a cyanide-laced apple.

After a cursory search I found a page that
mentioned this reference and refuted it as apocryphal. The design of
the Apple logo is briefly documented on the Bill Kelley site:

First, we designed the logo. That is, Rob Janoff
designed it -- an Apple with a bite out of it, indicating the
acquisition of knowledge. Originally, the apple logo was to be simple,
but the Apple II's advantage at the time was color output, so Jobs
argued the logo should have colors, and, of course, Jobs won. He ended
up actually specifying several of the colors of the logo.

“Switching To The Mac”

“How to jump ship from Windows— and love
it!”

Fri Nov 11 17:43:48 2005

“Switching To The Mac: Tiger Edition” was just
published by O'Reilly; it's been added to my Amazon wishlist. You
can't go wrong with O'Reilly books and from the comments on #macosx,
David Pogue is a knowledgeable author.

Daring Fireball 15 in. Powerbook Review

...the current 15-inch PowerBook G4 is an
appropriate send-off to one of the best products in Apple’s
history.—John Gruber

John Gruber picked up one of the new Powerbooks and has posted a
review after 2-weeks of use.

iDVD Update 5.0.1

Sat Nov 12 01:23:14 2005

I happened to be logged-in at the time I ran iDVD and it told me
that an update was available.

Make Your Own DVD

The reason I was running iDVD was that someone on #macosx said
that I could it could make DVDs given VIDEO_TS folder— but I
wasn't able to figure out how and no details were forthcoming. I knew
I could use DiskUtility to make a DMG and then burn that but that
would take longer than just burning the video folders straignt. I was
also told that I could just burn the video folders straight to a DVD
with whatever software I had handy. So I used BurnFreeX to make burn
the VIDEO_TS, JACKET_P and AUDIO_TS folders to a blank Maxell DVD I
had bought earlier. It took about 25 minutes.

After it finished burning, DVD Player started up but it wouldn't
play the DVD. I could manually point it to the VIDEO_TS folder and it
would play; the VAIO also played it. Now, all that remains is to see
whether my parent's DVD player will play it, which was my original
intent in making the DVD. (I suspect that the DVD Player plist file
is somehow confusing the DVD Player).

Google's Free WiFi

Sat Nov 12 20:42:27 2005

Slashdot has a story about Google providing free Wifi access in
Mountain View, California— if you can't bring advertising to
users, you bring users to the advertising. Nice indeed.

I can't believe the influence that “The Matrix” has
had on society that even today, there are icon themes and
screensavers because there is a audience for them. There is a
spectacular shareware version of the Matrix screensaver, that has the
viewer flying through and banking around the falling symbols.

Sony Fiasco

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Mon Nov 14 00:00:29 2005

It would be fair to say that the Sony VP who authorized the DRM
"rootkit" that prevents CDs from being copied, is no longer employed at
Sony. Wait, there's more— the code contains LGPL code from
LAME (the MP3 encoder).

Solarwind

Enabling Safesleep on Recent Macs

Mon Nov 14 08:13:36 2005

Andrew Escobar has provided a detailed how-to
to enable most any recent Mac to support Safesleep aka. "hibernate to
disk". According to the comments, Safesleep is especially useful on
the 12 in. Powerbook (which does not have battery-backed RAM for
swapping batteries) and on desktop computers which need to be moved
to a nother location.

1 Nano, Slightly Used

Oops!

Tue Nov 15 00:00:13 2005

<MeeKs_> ok so i stepped on my 2 month nano and the screen is cracked...
does apple offer any kind of warranty?
<e1f`> you stepped on it?
<e1f`> accidently?
<e1f`> what's it doing on the floor?
<MeeKs_> elf it was in my pocket
<MeeKs_> was changing after gym
<Darien> MeeKs_: their warrantee covers manufacturers defects only
<MeeKs_> it is a defect
<MeeKs_> the screen is weak as hell
<e1f`> does it still work?
<Darien> we'll take two nanos, and we'll not step on one, and we'll
see if it lasts
<MeeKs_> it works
<MeeKs_> its now a 4gb shuffle
<e1f`> sell it
<MeeKs_> i am
<e1f`> minus the price req. to get a replacement screen
<MeeKs_> its on ebay now
<Byers> "4GB Shuffle L@@K" <- on eBay
<Darien> see if you can find someone who stepped on theirs and broke
the wheel
<Byers> oh hey, I was just being facetious
<MeeKs_> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5829904320

Update Thu Nov 17 22:36:43 2005: It sold for US$126.

Applestore in the Eaton Center?

Tue Nov 15 11:56:02 2005

According to TUAW, searching for "Eaton Centre" in Apple's
job-posting site reveals some openings for positions in Toronto,
hinting at a future Applestore. The paradox is that there is no longer
an Eaton department store in the Eaton Centre.

“Mac Bathroom Reader”

Thu Nov 17 22:22:23 2005

An excerpt
from Owen Linzmayer's book, “The Mac Bathroom Reader”,
about the making of the "1984" MacIntosh Superbowl advertisement.

Busy Week at Work

Terribly busy week helping to set-up a wireless network at
work— installing the wireless network was the easy part,
configuring the RADIUS server to do WPA authentication so the network
is reasonably secure, was the hard part. I'll have to take
mathilde to work one day and see how easy it is to configure
her to join a wireless network. We have only tested Windows/XP (a
Dell and an old Toshiba which only supported 802.11a and required the
installation of a Wifi PC-card that supported WPA) clients, as that's
what everyone has (Linux clients are a lost cause).

iWords

Fri Nov 18 09:43:01 2005

The Oct. 30 (behind in my reading, as usual), NY Times Magazine,
"On Language" column by William Safire asked, "When was the
lowercase i before and uppercase anything born, and what did
it stand for?"

Officials at Apple Computer were unhelpful, presumably because they suspected that the etymological revelation would cause their stock to plunge again, but Dan Frakes of MacWorld magazine informs me that the first i-product was the iMac in 1998: "Apple said at the time that the i in iMac stood fo "Internet" , as the iMac as allegedly the easiest computer to connect to the Internet." Why not Imac or IMac? "They didn't want to dilute their brand name by lowercasing it (e.g. Imac)." ...

The iMac led to the iBook, a laptop, in 1999, followed by Apple's iPhoto, iTunes and a bundle sold as iLife. The meaning of i went beyond "Internet" to be taken as "individual", "integrated", "interactive" or— most appealing to consumers— "what I want when I want it". Because it is difficult to copyright a letter of the alphabet, other companies jumped in: a furniture manufacturer calls its massage chair an iJoy, "to emphasize the 'individual' interaction with the chair".

Why wasn't iPod, which originally played only music, named iMusic? "Apple planned from the very beginning," says Times tech columnist, David Pogue, "to expand its mission to text, photos, files and, as of this month, videos." The word pod was chosem, I deduce, to describe an all-purpose media module, its meaning, "a container or protective housing", long associated with peas and pregnancy but in recent decades applied to the streamlined fuel compartments under the wings of aircraft.

Wowzers!

I am probably the first person to ever sit next
to Veroniká Varekova and recognize her husband (Phoenix Coyote Petr
Nedved) first.—Hal Stern, “Beauty and the
Geek”

Fri Nov 18 12:06:02 2005

On his Nov.
11th blog entry, Hal Stern tells a story of sitting on a plane,
next to a beautiful woman who spoke three languages and was married
to NHL hockey player Petr Nedved. Only later, after getting home and
doing some Googling, did he realize that Nedved was married to
Veroniká Varekova, who models for Victoria's Secrets and was
a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue covergirl. *Sigh* Why
doesn't stuff like this ever happen to me? Oh, I know why—
because I would likely ignore her as per my rule of not speaking to
people without having been introduced to them.

More Mac Users

Fri Nov 18 21:25:22 2005

I saw another Powerbook or iBook (didn't have my glasses with me)
on the GO train a couple of days ago; a shuffle (on a neck cord)
yesterday and another 3 white headphones.

While configuring our wifi network at work we were using a Dell
sub-notebook to test the range of the access-points when the office
temp walked-in and started to "oooh" and "aaah" over this shiny,
silver thing. She mentioned she liked Windows over a Mac. I expressed
surprise over her having used a Mac; she said it was her room-mate's
computer. I asked her why she didn't like it; she said "stuff didn't
work". Like what? I asked; MSN, she said.

Memo to Apple: if you're going to release x86 based Macs and
you're hoping to attract Windows users (the masses), just be sure
that MSN works.

Continuing the conversation, I asked her whether her room-mate
(who was described as a "hippie") had a car; she did, but the temp
didn't remember what it was. She promised to ask. My hunch is that
it's a VW.

David emailed the following response:

MSN does work (my sister uses it all the time).

I think there are maybe a couple of advanced things that aren't
supported though (like skins, and animated icons ("winks")). Basic
chatting and file transfers are fine AFAICT. I'd be curious to know
what she means by "work".

Remember that Apple doesn't really have control over MSN Messenger
since it's made by Microsoft (iChat uses AOL's network). A pretty
good replacement if you want straight chat is Adium X (supports
multiple protocols through GAIM)--a lot of people prefer the
interface and it supports Growl.

In response, I have to say that we're assuming that the
room-mate's Mac is running OS X. I cannot imagine probing further on
this issue; e.g. asking what OS the Mac was running, as her answer
would inevitably be, "I don't know— it's a Mac."

LoginWindow Manager

Sat Nov 19 20:14:31 2005

Useful utility to have
if you admin OS X in a corporate or educational environment; it
allows various aspects of the login window to be customized.

The Magic of rsync

Sat Nov 19 22:16:25 2005

I was reading Dive Into Mark's OS X
Essentials where he mentioned how impressed he was with rsync's
algorithm of figuring out which files changed and which didn't and
that he remembered it was somebody's PhD thesis. There was a
follow-up post that linked to the thesis.

Calm Technology

How calm and gentle I proceeded still In all my writings.—“Anthony and Cleopatra”, act v, sc. i

Romance is tempestuous. Love is calm.—Mason Cooley

Sun Nov 20 09:11:26 2005

A couple of days ago, on #emacs, <paroneayea> asked whether
Emacs was a good application for "writing" (a book; some sort of
literary work; perhaps an essay)— exercising ones
creativity. The ensuing discussion began with the way Emacs
auto-filled text as it was typed-in, which then required the user to
constantly type M-q to re-fill the paragraph because it looked
jagged. I dared to commit sacrilege by proposing that Emacs is not
good for writing because it's "an editor"— to be used to
edit or shape the "writing", after the text has
been written— and that paper and pencil is better suited for
such endeavours.

Naturally, there were a few arguments against paper and pencil;
the most common one was that because we use hand-writing so
infrequently, it has become illegible (I do marvel at the legibile
beauty of my Mom and Dad's handwriting) and this makes transcribing
the written text into the computer that much more difficult. My
suggestion was to just write in uppercase— that's what I do as
my cursive writing is close to cryptic.

I argued that the entire process of cursoring-around the screen,
filling a paragraph and deleting text, distracts from the natural
flow of writing. On a piece of paper, when you cross something out,
the text is still readable; all new text gets added at the end. There
is a natural flow and a visible record to the thought-process.

If you watch the behind-the-scenes documentaries for Star Wars or
the Lord of the Rings, you will note that all the conceptual artists
draw and sketch their initial designs on paper and only later, once a
particular one is chosen and finalized , does the computer make an
appearance. In the Star Wars documentaries, Lucas is shown (recreating
his daily writing ritual) sitting down with some pencils and a pad of
paper and writing the script to Star Wars.

The desktop metaphor as a computer interface, pioneered at Xerox
PARC and first popularized by Apple, has been stretched to its
extreme as the computer Desktop has become distracting to the
point of hindering productivity— icons beeping, blinking and
flashing, the background image changing periodically, calendar
reminders popping-up, irc channel, email and instant-message
notifications.

Now compare the computer desktop to a real desktop with a pad of
paper and a pen. There are no distractions; the entire environment is
a sea of calmness that encourages creativity and allows you to focus
at the single task— this metaphor has also been applied to
technology. The term, "calm
technology", jointly coined by the late Mark Weiser and John
Seely Brown at Xerox PARC in 1996, applies to technology that relaxes
the user by moving irrelevant information to the periphery but
allowing it to be immediately available when needed, without
distraction. Designing calm technology is very difficult to do.

Paper is calm, Microsoft Word is not; Terminal.app
is calm, OS X Desktop is not (especially the bouncy-bouncy icons
in the Dock). I now realize why the "Hide Others" menu option exists
in Apple's menu.

David emailed a reply:

> There is a natural flow and a visible record to the
thought-process.

Neal Stephenson wrote the three books in his “Baroque
Cycle” (over 1000 printed pages) in long hand. You can find
pictures of the manuscript on his site.

Spirited Away

Spirited
Away is a clever application that hides inactive applications
after a preset interval. As I've mentioned before, I tend to keep
all my applications open— people who have seen my OS X
Desktop screen-captures have commented that it looks messy and
cluttered (I have never found that to be the case). I also place my
applications in particular locations on my screen— the main
Terminal is on the middle-left; Stickies are on the top-left; Firefox
download window on the bottom left; iTunes and Weather on the bottom
right; Firefox occupies the left-half of the screen and Emacs, the
right-half. I would find it confusing and upsetting if applications
dissappeared off my screen without my knowledge and interaction;
Sprited Away is not calm.

Tallis, Palestrina and Garageband

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He
claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among
the human race long before the power of speech was arrived
at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are
vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world
was in its childhood.—Sherlock Holmes in “A Study
in Scarlet”

Sun Nov 20 18:34:49 2005

This morning, beginning at 8AM, CBC Radio's Choral
Concert had a three hour celebration of Thomas Tallis on the 400th
anniversary of his death (there is some dispute whether he died on
Nov. 20th or the 23rd).

I was Googling around for "Tallis" and I came upon Choral Wiki
collection of sheet music and MIDI files. Since Garageband 2.0 was
reported to be able to play MIDI files, I downloaded Palestrina's
Kyrie from Missa
Papae Marcelli as a MIDI. Looking through the Garageband menus, I
couldn't figure out how to import the file into Garageband; so I just
dragged and dropped the file and it imported! Impressive! After
decreasing the tempo of the MIDI file, I had a faithful rendition of
the Kyrie which I could follow along with the PDF musical score I
downloaded and the musical notation in Garageband itself (Open the
Music Editor and click the musical note button).

Games

Mon Nov 21 22:02:30 2005

Warbirds
is a 330MB demo that looks really cool. Will download and post a
review later.

Cube
is a first-person shooter that uses a modified Quake or Doom
engine.

iPhoto Buddy

Tue Nov 22 07:58:03 2005

I was thinking of make a hardcover photobook documenting the
construction of our new Centre for Computing and Engineering. I have
2 or 3 CDs full of photos and I didn't want to mix those photos in
with my family photos. I remembered reading that there was a iPhoto
plugin that permitted multiple Libraries to be specified and
segregating photos within several libraries. The plugin is called iPhoto Buddy.

Lacie (LEGO) Brick Hard-disks

Tue Nov 22 18:00:28 2005

Lacie will soon be shipping external drives that look like LEGO
bricks. Jim Koch, who introduced me to the joys of collecting
LEGO noted that once LEGO lost the "bump-and-feel" lawsuit against
MEGABlocks, brick-like products are now fair game.

The Feast After the Feast

The day after Thanksgiving Day is known for sales in the US (the
equivalent of Boxing Day following Christmas Day in Commonwealth
countries). Apple
is no exception.

<br0iled> posted a link to a list of items on
sale last year, and the corresponding discounts.

“Parental Switchers”

Wed Nov 23 13:47:30 2005

Browsing through Sun blogs I found an entry
about people deciding to buy a Mac instead of a PC:

So just over a week ago my dad gave me a call asking about couple of
PCs in a major electronics ads. I gave my thoughts on the couple
systems he was looking at and then I asked him if he had thought
about switching to a Mac... then I come to find out 5 days later he
is in the Apple retail store and letting me know he is purchasing a
20 inch iMac. They were wicked impressed with the support in the store
and how easy it was to use the apps.

Games Update

Thu Nov 24 12:53:58 2005

I'm having a bit of trouble flying the airplanes using a
mouse/trackpad in Warbirds III. There are some vague hints that this
is possible but I have not been able to figure it out— so I
sent off an email to the developers asking if it was possible. From
articles I have read on the web, it seems that Warbirds went through
considerable to get joysticks working with this game. I am quite
impressed with the in-game tutorials for flying, navigating and
maneuvering a vintage aircraft.

In the mean time, I am downloading the America's
Army: Special Forces game— a first-person shooter which
should be playable with an ordinary mouse and/or trackpad.

Digg

Installed America's Army: Special Forces

Fri Nov 25 12:08:39 2005

Before leaving for work, this morning, I installed America's Army
(downloaded yesterday) off the Lacie drive (the DMG is about 800 MB;
and it took a few minutes to install about 2 GB), started it up
looked at the menus and exited. It looks like there is a offline
training section; the actual misions are online multi-player.

When people say that there are no video-games for Macs, it is a
uninformed myth. Nearly all major video games are available for the
Mac because they are based on one or two game-engines that have been
ported to the Mac. What is certainly true is that there are far more
video games for the PC than there are for the Mac and that most of
the games available for the PC are completely craptacular. There are
exceptions, of course— Microsoft Flight Simulator is not
available for the Mac but the alternative, X-Plane, is more than
an adequate substitute.

Ive Interview

“Our goals are simple. We genuinely try to make the very best product
that we can. We have a belief that we can solve our problems and make
products better and better. It's a simple goal to articulate, but a
difficult one to achieve.”

... Ive's and Apple's philosophy [is] that their computers and music
players should be simple to use and beautiful to look at...

Ive— who says he gets his inspiration from the everyday stuff
that surrounds him— believes that design and ease of use are as
important as function...The team spent months getting the hinge
connecting the base [of the iMac] to the screen perfectly balanced so
it stayed in position...

“What you and I are left to deal with are the things we care
about. All of the stuff that makes this technology possible is
resolved in a way that doesn't force you to deal with it. We are left
with this gorgeous display. I love the way this solves lots of
problems in such a calm and serene way.”

Hmm...there's that word— “calm”.

Dimple

Sat Nov 26 14:40:47 2005

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.
Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.
—Philip Larkin, “The Winter Palace.”

When I went to clean the underside of
mathilde I noticed a small dimple in the case(!), refer to
the left photo. The only explanation I have is that it is due to the
manner in which I tend to work with the Powerbook in bed (refer to
the middle photo)— I place it on top of two pairs of DVD cases
to allow air-circulation down the center. I must have pressed down a
bit too strongly at one time and the Powerbook was positioned in such
a way that the corner of the DVD case dug-into the aluminum case. I
have re-arranged the DVD cases in a 2x2 grid to provide a stable
platform (see right photo). On the bright side, I now have a way of
uniquiely identifying my Powerbook.

David admonishes my not-so-clever-dvd-case-powerbook-stand:

Instead of kludging a solution together, it's possible to spend a
little and get a proper one:

In case anyone is wondering, the DVDs in question are:
Stalag 17, X-15, Sneakers and Paths of Glory.

Hiring Practices

Sun Nov 27 10:30:59 2005

I have waded through my share of résumés in search
of a candidate that met the qualifications to fill a job
position. Many of the résumés I read were just wasting
my time, some were clearly attempting to pander to the job-opening by
including "experienced with foo" but omitting the details on how they
had used "foo" in their job. I needed a better way to cull the
waste— I decided on a metric whereby a single spelling-mistake
in the résumés was enough reason to diqualify the
candidate. I read through nearly 100 résumés (I was
asked to select six applicants) and did not find a single one that
was worth an interview. In the end, I randomly chose six
résumés from the pile that remained. The six candidates
were interviewed and none were hired; the job was advertised
again. By this time, two months had passed since the first
job-posting.

The danger in hiring incompetent people is the inevitable
repetition of the hiring, interview and training process with the new
candidate(s). Candidates with the least risk are the ones that have
been referred to you by someone you know, trust and whose opinion you
value. It is my experience that hiring based solely on
résumés, interviews and calling references do not
produce the best results; this is standard operating procedure only
because of the limited resources of HR departments. There is also no
standardized test to gauge stupidity.

Hiring competent people is an even bigger dilemma for companies
that are growing at high rates. According to a recent Wall Street
Journal article on the hiring frenzy currently underway, Google has
been doubling in size annually since 2002 when they had 500
employees&mdash at the end of September 2005, they had 5000
employees— they hire an average of 10 employees a day. To
eliminate the possibility of hiring stupid people, Google has begun
hiring engineers working for eBay and Yahoo! The idea is to let
someone else go through the trouble of interviewing and weeding and
then you scoop them up— this technique only works when the
companies are similar; Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon are the survivors
of the dot-com era. Ebay lost 10-20 engineers to Google this year and
Google has "agressively" pursued Yahoo! engineers to the point where
an engineer was offered double the normal stock options when he
refused Google's offer. The engineer joined Yahoo! in the end.

One top-notch engineer is worth "300 times or more than the average,"
says Alan Eustace, a Google vice-president of engineering.

He says he would rather lose an entire class of engineering graduates
than one exceptional technologist. Many google services such as Gmail
and Google News were started by a single person...

Google's typical hiring process is regarded as one of the industry's
most gruelling and extensive. Candidates are often subjected to weeks
of interviews, with hiring decisions often made by large committees
of executives..."You have to get approved by 14 people at least
before you get hired."

According to the article, Google also uses the services of two
recruiting firms, Job
Machine and Recruiting Choices; the team of in-house hiring
consultants is codenamed "Zion" (Matrix reference) and they are
instructed to specifically increase the pool of female engineers.

Flaky “K”

Six Sigma produces a product that satisfies the
customer and minimizes supplier losses to the point at which it is
not cost effective to pursue a higher quality.—Wikipedia

Mon Nov 28 12:38:45 2005

Sunday morning, I woke-up mathilde and noticed that the "k"
key on my keyboard was flaky— I had to press it harder than
usual and sometimes it typed and other times it didn't— by the
end of the day, however, it was working fine. Hm. I don't know what
to make of it— the only thing that changed was that I
re-configured the DVD case configuration that my Powerbook rested on.

Today I read that John Hicks is keeping
score on the number of times Apple equipment has flaked-out on
him; the inevitable follow-ups to his blog post add to the cry.

Consider that Apple ships millions of pieces of hardware
and then even with Six Sigma quality,
there will be a few faulty pieces. Perfection is hard to achieve when
you don't have guranteed control of every part of the manufacturing
process.

Snö

Update Mon Nov 28 21:48:23 2005: as a screen saver, the
snowflakes falling over a black background look jittery but as a
desktop toy they look fine. My only suggestion for improvement would
be to have an option for the snow to collect over the tops of the
windows and at the bottom of the desktop.

DOSbox

Tue Nov 29 08:41:15 2005

If for whatever reason (and old favourite DOS game, for example), you
ever need to run a MS-DOS program under OS X, there's DOSbox
and the front-end DOSboxer.

MacLampsX

Tue Nov 29 13:22:19 2005

MacLampsX
is another desktop toy that adds a border of decorative lights.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Announced

Wed Nov 30 08:01:36 2005

The long-awaited release of Firefox 1.5 finally happened,
unofficially, at first, when Slashdot posted an item and now
officially. Should I wait for 1.5.0.1 or should I just go ahead?
First, I should check if my favourite extensions (NoScript,
TargetAlert and Flashblock), will work with 1.5 and decide to upgrade
based on those results.

Gaming Update: Deleted American's Army

I deleted American's Army after being unable to connect to the
online server ever. I even went thorough the trouble of creating an
account with the AA server, which is required if you want to take the
subsequent training missions that follow the first shooting-range
evaluation.

Gaming Update: Re-install Warbirds 3

I am going to re-install Warbirds 3 as I received a reply on
Monday night from their technical support that answered my question
about whether planes could be flown with the mouse: Alt-M enables
mouse-flight mode.

HD-DVD and Blu-ray Now, Holographic Storage Later

Wed Nov 30 08:36:41 2005

A HD-DVD (Toshiba) stores 30GB, a Blu-ray (Sony) stores 50GB and
Holographic Disc (InPhase/Hitachi) stores 300GB. Both HD-DVD and
Blu-ray are consumer products— media costs a few dollars;
HoloDisc is not an option as a single disc costs US$120 and
the reader/writer costs US$15,000.

The Mothership

Wed Nov 30 21:34:21 2005

Google has a recruitment
video and according to the posted description, it is specifically
designed to recruit female engineers (see also my hiring journal entry). But the video may well serve to recruit
even more male engineers as the featured engineers are quite
attractive!

Update Thu Dec 01 13:53:43 2005: Searching for “Alan
Kay” in Google Video returns some videos. Watching the Kyoto
Prize Awards is difficult as the video and audio are not in sync
and inaudible at times. Another
video about the history of user interfaces, made during his
tenure as an Apple Fellow, has better production values.

Update Fri Dec 02 21:51:38 2005: I've nearly finished
watching the first video (I've reached the Q&A section). I found that I
couldn't just let the lecture play in the background while I did some
other work— I had to pay close attention to what he was
saying. So I ended up watching the video over 2 days which helped in
absorbing the information.